Hello,
please, can somebody tell me if can i virtualize Solaris 11 SPARC architecture in a x86 PC?
Virtualbox allows doing that? i need to run Solaris 11 SPARC to make a lab, and dont have any SUN machine to do on it.
Thanks in advance!
Hey Muzi,
There is a difference between cross cpu and native cpu based virtual machines. What you want is Emulation. Qemu can do this. You may be more familiar with it on SuperNintendo sites than with Unix however. The reason is that there is a huge performance penalty translating between processor systems. In your case running sparc on x86 will be at least 10 times slower. If you have a 3 gigahertz Intel processor don't expect anything faster than a 300 megahertz sparc. And that is optimistic.
Also the setup is non trivial. I wanted to do it but still haven't done it for that exact reason.
Regards
If you only want to make a lab, can't you use Solaris 11 x86 instead? That will run beautifully under VMWare for example...
I think 64bit sparc solaris still can't be emulated. But you could run 32bit sparc Solaris 9 in Qemu.
Have a look at "Artyom Tarasenko's blog".
That's an understatement. AFAIK, there has been zero report of successful complete boot of Solaris on sun4u architecture. On SPARC, Solaris 11 kernel is 64 bit only.
Hey, thanks all for answer. Im doing my engeneer tesis and i need to run solaris 11 with 1 solaris 9 zone. My tesis is about sparc architecture so thats the reason i need to virtualize it. But im considering get an old sparc machine to make the lab.
Any other idea?
thanks in advance
If you are talking SPARC architecture then AFAIK a Solaris 9 zone (known as a legacy zone) is not supported on a Solaris 11 host (global zone).
However, if you used Solaris 10 as your host OS then setting up a Solaris 9 legacy zone on that is easy.
You are correct, there is no support for a Solaris 9 zone under Solaris 11, this is true whatever the CPU architecture (SPARC or x86).
Correct, note that you can't run a Solaris 9 legacy zone under a Solaris 10 non global zone either.
So MuziKizuM,
I looked into getting the real deal and just using a Sparc box. They are actually very affordable on ebay (I'm not saying cheap, just affordable, like the cost of a couple course textbooks.)
I can't post URLs but ebay searches for T2 Sparc turn up plenty of options.
There are 1 rack unit T2 Sparc processor based boxes, the 5120s, and they have good resources to run guests in zones. They do run Solaris 11 (see below about Hardware Compatibility List) but you might want to stick with 10 for the compatibility with running 9 in a zones etc etc.
Whichever system(s) you end up considering look at the Oracle HCL to check what exactly is supported.
That is indeed a good option.
With a UltraSPARC T based system, you can create both a Solaris 10 ldom with a Solaris 9 branded zone under its global zone, and a Solaris 11.2 ldom. All three OSes running in parallel.